How to Take a Memorable Picture? Empowering Users with Actionable Feedback

Image memorability, i.e., how likely an image is to be remembered, has traditionally been studied in computer vision either as a passive prediction task, with models regressing a scalar score, or with generative methods altering the visual input to boost the image likelihood of being remembered. Yet, none of these paradigms supports users at capture time, when the crucial question is how to improve a photo memorability. We introduce the task of Memorability Feedback (MemFeed), where an automated model should provide actionable, human-interpretable guidance to users with the goal to enhance an image future recall. We also present MemCoach, the first approach designed to provide concrete suggestions in natural language for memorability improvement (e.g., "emphasize facial expression," "bring the subject forward"). Our method, based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), is training-free and employs a teacher-student steering strategy, aligning the model internal activations toward more memorable patterns learned from a teacher model progressing along least-to-most memorable samples. To enable systematic evaluation on this novel task, we further introduce MemBench, a new benchmark featuring sequence-aligned photoshoots with annotated memorability scores. Our experiments, considering multiple MLLMs, demonstrate the effectiveness of MemCoach, showing consistently improved performance over several zero-shot models. The results indicate that memorability can not only be predicted but also taught and instructed, shifting the focus from mere prediction to actionable feedback for human creators.

Indaleko: The Unified Personal Index

Personal information retrieval fails when systems ignore how human memory works. While existing platforms force keyword searches across isolated silos, humans naturally recall through episodic cues like when, where, and in what context information was encountered. This dissertation presents the Unified Personal Index (UPI), a memory-aligned architecture that bridges this fundamental gap. The Indaleko prototype demonstrates the UPI's feasibility on a 31-million file dataset spanning 160TB across eight storage platforms. By integrating temporal, spatial, and activity metadata into a unified graph database, Indaleko enables natural language queries like "photos near the conference venue last spring" that existing systems cannot process. The implementation achieves sub-second query responses through memory anchor indexing, eliminates cross-platform search fragmentation, and maintains perfect precision for well-specified memory patterns. Evaluation against commercial systems (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Windows Search) reveals that all fail on memory-based queries, returning overwhelming result sets without contextual filtering. In contrast, Indaleko successfully processes multi-dimensional queries combining time, location, and activity patterns. The extensible architecture supports rapid integration of new data sources (10 minutes to 10 hours per provider) while preserving privacy through UUID-based semantic decoupling. The UPI's architectural synthesis bridges cognitive theory with distributed systems design, as demonstrated through the Indaleko prototype and rigorous evaluation. This work transforms personal information retrieval from keyword matching to memory-aligned finding, providing immediate benefits for existing data while establishing foundations for future context-aware systems.

L3DR: 3D-aware LiDAR Diffusion and Rectification

Range-view (RV) based LiDAR diffusion has recently made huge strides towards 2D photo-realism. However, it neglects 3D geometry realism and often generates various RV artifacts such as depth bleeding and wavy surfaces. We design L3DR, a 3D-aware LiDAR Diffusion and Rectification framework that can regress and cancel RV artifacts in 3D space and restore local geometry accurately. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that 3D models are inherently superior to 2D models in generating sharp and authentic boundaries. Leveraging such analysis, we design a 3D residual regression network that rectifies RV artifacts and achieves superb geometry realism by predicting point-level offsets in 3D space. On top of that, we design a Welsch Loss that helps focus on local geometry and ignore anomalous regions effectively. Extensive experiments over multiple benchmarks including KITTI, KITTI360, nuScenes and Waymo show that the proposed L3DR achieves state-of-the-art generation and superior geometry-realism consistently. In addition, L3DR is generally applicable to different LiDAR diffusion models with little computational overhead.

NRGS-SLAM: Monocular Non-Rigid SLAM for Endoscopy via Deformation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) is a fundamental capability for autonomous perception and navigation. However, endoscopic scenes violate the rigidity assumption due to persistent soft-tissue deformations, creating a strong coupling ambiguity between camera ego-motion and intrinsic deformation. Although recent monocular non-rigid SLAM methods have made notable progress, they often lack effective decoupling mechanisms and rely on sparse or low-fidelity scene representations, which leads to tracking drift and limited reconstruction quality. To address these limitations, we propose NRGS-SLAM, a monocular non-rigid SLAM system for endoscopy based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. To resolve the coupling ambiguity, we introduce a deformation-aware 3D Gaussian map that augments each Gaussian primitive with a learnable deformation probability, optimized via a Bayesian self-supervision strategy without requiring external non-rigidity labels. Building on this representation, we design a deformable tracking module that performs robust coarse-to-fine pose estimation by prioritizing low-deformation regions, followed by efficient per-frame deformation updates. A carefully designed deformable mapping module progressively expands and refines the map, balancing representational capacity and computational efficiency. In addition, a unified robust geometric loss incorporates external geometric priors to mitigate the inherent ill-posedness of monocular non-rigid SLAM. Extensive experiments on multiple public endoscopic datasets demonstrate that NRGS-SLAM achieves more accurate camera pose estimation (up to 50\% reduction in RMSE) and higher-quality photo-realistic reconstructions than state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our key design choices. Source code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

Markerless 6D Pose Estimation and Position-Based Visual Servoing for Endoscopic Continuum Manipulators

Continuum manipulators in flexible endoscopic surgical systems offer high dexterity for minimally invasive procedures; however, accurate pose estimation and closed-loop control remain challenging due to hysteresis, compliance, and limited distal sensing. Vision-based approaches reduce hardware complexity but are often constrained by limited geometric observability and high computational overhead, restricting real-time closed-loop applicability. This paper presents a unified framework for markerless stereo 6D pose estimation and position-based visual servoing of continuum manipulators. A photo-realistic simulation pipeline enables large-scale automatic training with pixel-accurate annotations. A stereo-aware multi-feature fusion network jointly exploits segmentation masks, keypoints, heatmaps, and bounding boxes to enhance geometric observability. To enforce geometric consistency without iterative optimization, a feed-forward rendering-based refinement module predicts residual pose corrections in a single pass. A self-supervised sim-to-real adaptation strategy further improves real-world performance using unlabeled data. Extensive real-world validation achieves a mean translation error of 0.83 mm and a mean rotation error of 2.76° across 1,000 samples. Markerless closed-loop visual servoing driven by the estimated pose attains accurate trajectory tracking with a mean translation error of 2.07 mm and a mean rotation error of 7.41°, corresponding to 85% and 59% reductions compared to open-loop control, together with high repeatability in repeated point-reaching tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first fully markerless pose-estimation-driven position-based visual servoing framework for continuum manipulators, enabling precise closed-loop control without physical markers or embedded sensing.

Visual Persuasion: What Influences Decisions of Vision-Language Models?

The web is littered with images, once created for human consumption and now increasingly interpreted by agents using vision-language models (VLMs). These agents make visual decisions at scale, deciding what to click, recommend, or buy. Yet, we know little about the structure of their visual preferences. We introduce a framework for studying this by placing VLMs in controlled image-based choice tasks and systematically perturbing their inputs. Our key idea is to treat the agent's decision function as a latent visual utility that can be inferred through revealed preference: choices between systematically edited images. Starting from common images, such as product photos, we propose methods for visual prompt optimization, adapting text optimization methods to iteratively propose and apply visually plausible modifications using an image generation model (such as in composition, lighting, or background). We then evaluate which edits increase selection probability. Through large-scale experiments on frontier VLMs, we demonstrate that optimized edits significantly shift choice probabilities in head-to-head comparisons. We develop an automatic interpretability pipeline to explain these preferences, identifying consistent visual themes that drive selection. We argue that this approach offers a practical and efficient way to surface visual vulnerabilities, safety concerns that might otherwise be discovered implicitly in the wild, supporting more proactive auditing and governance of image-based AI agents.

Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-tuning for CLIP

Recent studies have shown that CLIP model's adversarial robustness in zero-shot classification tasks can be enhanced by adversarially fine-tuning its image encoder with adversarial examples (AEs), which are generated by minimizing the cosine similarity between images and a hand-crafted template (e.g., ''A photo of a {label}''). However, it has been shown that the cosine similarity between a single image and a single hand-crafted template is insufficient to measure the similarity for image-text pairs. Building on this, in this paper, we find that the AEs generated using cosine similarity may fail to fool CLIP when the similarity metric is replaced with semantically enriched alternatives, making the image encoder fine-tuned with these AEs less robust. To overcome this issue, we first propose a semantic-ensemble attack to generate semantic-aware AEs by minimizing the average similarity between the original image and an ensemble of refined textual descriptions. These descriptions are initially generated by a foundation model to capture core semantic features beyond hand-crafted templates and are then refined to reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-Tuning (SAFT), which fine-tunes CLIP's image encoder with semantic-aware AEs. Extensive experiments show that SAFT outperforms current methods, achieving substantial improvements in zero-shot adversarial robustness across 16 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/SAFT.

Advancing Digital Twin Generation Through a Novel Simulation Framework and Quantitative Benchmarking

The generation of 3D models from real-world objects has often been accomplished through photogrammetry, i.e., by taking 2D photos from a variety of perspectives and then triangulating matched point-based features to create a textured mesh. Many design choices exist within this framework for the generation of digital twins, and differences between such approaches are largely judged qualitatively. Here, we present and test a novel pipeline for generating synthetic images from high-quality 3D models and programmatically generated camera poses. This enables a wide variety of repeatable, quantifiable experiments which can compare ground-truth knowledge of virtual camera parameters and of virtual objects against the reconstructed estimations of those perspectives and subjects.

SemiNFT: Learning to Transfer Presets from Imitation to Appreciation via Hybrid-Sample Reinforcement Learning

Photorealistic color retouching plays a vital role in visual content creation, yet manual retouching remains inaccessible to non-experts due to its reliance on specialized expertise. Reference-based methods offer a promising alternative by transferring the preset color of a reference image to a source image. However, these approaches often operate as novice learners, performing global color mappings derived from pixel-level statistics, without a true understanding of semantic context or human aesthetics. To address this issue, we propose SemiNFT, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based retouching framework that mirrors the trajectory of human artistic training: beginning with rigid imitation and evolving into intuitive creation. Specifically, SemiNFT is first taught with paired triplets to acquire basic structural preservation and color mapping skills, and then advanced to reinforcement learning (RL) on unpaired data to cultivate nuanced aesthetic perception. Crucially, during the RL stage, to prevent catastrophic forgetting of old skills, we design a hybrid online-offline reward mechanism that anchors aesthetic exploration with structural review. % experiments Extensive experiments show that SemiNFT not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard preset transfer benchmarks but also demonstrates remarkable intelligence in zero-shot tasks, such as black-and-white photo colorization and cross-domain (anime-to-photo) preset transfer. These results confirm that SemiNFT transcends simple statistical matching and achieves a sophisticated level of aesthetic comprehension. Our project can be found at https://melanyyang.github.io/SemiNFT/.

Visual Word Sense Disambiguation with CLIP through Dual-Channel Text Prompting and Image Augmentations

Ambiguity poses persistent challenges in natural language understanding for large language models (LLMs). To better understand how lexical ambiguity can be resolved through the visual domain, we develop an interpretable Visual Word Sense Disambiguation (VWSD) framework. The model leverages CLIP to project ambiguous language and candidate images into a shared multimodal space. We enrich textual embeddings using a dual-channel ensemble of semantic and photo-based prompts with WordNet synonyms, while image embeddings are refined through robust test-time augmentations. We then use cosine similarity to determine the image that best aligns with the ambiguous text. When evaluated on the SemEval-2023 VWSD dataset, enriching the embeddings raises the MRR from 0.7227 to 0.7590 and the Hit Rate from 0.5810 to 0.6220. Ablation studies reveal that dual-channel prompting provides strong, low-latency performance, whereas aggressive image augmentation yields only marginal gains. Additional experiments with WordNet definitions and multilingual prompt ensembles further suggest that noisy external signals tend to dilute semantic specificity, reinforcing the effectiveness of precise, CLIP-aligned prompts for visual word sense disambiguation.